Charlie’s marriage had broken up by the time I was in my teens, and his only close family were his two sisters. Charlie had always drunk heavily, and his failed marriage only made this worse. I respected the way in which Mum tried to help him, having him home regularly, despite Charlie often being the worse for wear. Her tense reaction whenever he was affected by drink showed just how strongly her childhood experiences of alcoholism had affected her. She often told me that she thought Charlie had had a tough life, frequently mentioning the fact that he had spent the night of his 21st birthday sleeping under a bridge, whilst on the track for work in the Shepparton area of Victoria in the mid-1920s.
My mother and her sister May (Roberts) were very close. May did not marry until her early 40s and had no children. She lived in the same suburb as us and saw a great deal of our family, especially me. We formed a very close bond, as she also did with my brother Bob, when we were all a good deal older. May had a genuinely sunny and positive disposition. To employ a phrase typical of her generation, her life had been no ‘bed of roses', yet she always seemed happy with her lot. She was a wonderful woman, and like my wife’s mother, Beryl Parker, had an extraordinary capacity always to see the best in people. She was a special person and I remember her with very deep love and affection.
Lyall and Mona Howard had four sons: Walter (Wal), born in 1926, Stanley (Stan) in 1930, Robert (Bob) in 1936 and me in 1939. The Great Depression had its impact on family planning.
As best I could describe it, I grew up in a stable, lower middle-class home. When Dad went into business, establishing a garage with his father, he was able to make a reasonably comfortable living for our family. Mum was a full-time homemaker, who dedicated her life to the care and upbringing of her four sons. Mum and Dad were both conservative, patriotic Australians.
The house I grew up in was a Californian bungalow, built in the early 1920s. Earlwood, in Sydney’s inner southwest, was full of them. It was heavily settled after the Great War. Street names such as Flers, Hamilton, Dellwood, Kitchener and Fricourt were testament to that. It was a three-bedroom home, so until I was well into my teens I shared a bedroom with Bob. About my earliest memory was looking at the blackout paper which my parents had placed over the small casement window in the loungeroom. That must have been in 1942, when there were frequent blackouts in Sydney through fear of possible air raids.
Politics was talked a lot at home. From a very early age I listened to discussions about world events, as well as particular issues affecting Sydney and Australia. Being the youngest in the family, it was natural that I imbibed much from my parents and elder brothers.
Towards the end of 1949, I knew that there was an election coming up from the talk at home, seeing the newspapers and listening to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) news. Mum and Dad were both strong Liberals and had plenty of good things to say about Bob Menzies, then Leader of the Opposition, but soon to become prime minister and to stay in that position longer than any other person in Australian history.
Owning a garage, or service station, my father had been bedevilled from the war years onwards by petrol rationing. Dad would bring home the ration tickets and my brother Bob would join me in counting them on the breakfast-room table. I thought this was a lot of fun, and I missed it when it ended. My parents didn’t. Menzies’ 1949 election promise to remove petrol rationing attracted them greatly, and they were delighted when it was abolished.
Petrol rationing had been an understandable wartime measure, but in peacetime it was a real bugbear for anyone in my father’s business, and motorists generally. It was abolished for a period and then brought back shortly before the 1949 election.
The Labor PM at the time, Ben Chifley, was well liked. To his credit, his Government began the great postwar migration surge — then overseen by his Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell — which helped shape the modern Australia. He also launched the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which remains a national development icon.
But when it came to economics, the Chifley Labor Government, in the late ‘40s, remained locked in the wartime mindset of controls and micromanagement of the economy.
Chifley led a government which tried to nationalise the private trading banks. This move galvanised into action many supporters of free enterprise, and not just the banks. Everything had gone wrong for Chifley following his Government’s re-election in 1946. His attempt to nationalise the banks had been rejected as unconstitutional by both the High Court of Australia and the Privy Council. Massive strikes on the NSW coalfields in 1949 produced prolonged blackouts in Sydney. In the end Chifley had to embrace what for a Labor man like him must have been a nightmare: the use of troops on the coalfields to keep essential supplies moving.
The times were clearly right for a man and a party preaching the gospel of competition and fewer government controls. Bob Menzies and the Liberal Party neatly filled the bill. Anyhow, that was what my parents, Lyall and Mona Howard, thought. So did my eldest brother, Wal, the only one of their children then to have a vote.
My parents were part of the ‘forgotten people’ who Menzies had defined in his famous radio broadcast in 1942: they neither belonged to organised labour, nor were rich and powerful. He called them middle class, with the description of ‘salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on'. Mum and Dad aimed to give their four sons more security and more opportunities than they themselves had had. In that, they were successful, for which I and my brothers are eternally grateful.
Several days before the election took place a newspaper I bought carried the headline ‘Final Gallup Poll Predicts Coalition Victory'. On election night, my brother Bob and I had gone to a local picture theatre with our parents. During the screening of the second film, the theatre management displayed a slide which showed that the Coalition had taken an early lead. In those days polling booths remained open until 8 pm.
When we got home, we found my brother Wal sitting on the floor in front of the radio. He said that Menzies had won and that the biggest swing had been in Queensland. On that latter score at least, nothing much has changed in almost 60 years. When the Coalition won government in 1996, Labor was routed in the Sunshine State, and in 2007 the Labor Party achieved a greater swing in that state than in any other part of Australia. Everyone in our household was very happy with the result. Daniel Mulcahy was comfortably returned as the Labor member for Lang. Those shed workers across the road had done their job.
For as long as I can remember, I was a regular listener to sport on ABC Radio, mainly cricket and rugby league. Cricket always came first. I knew the names of Bradman, Miller and Lindwall before I learned the name Menzies. My father took me to the Sydney Cricket Ground on 28 February 1949 to see Don Bradman play for the last time at that ground, in the Kippax-Oldfield Testimonial. It was the only occasion on which I saw the great man play.
I also had a keen interest in boxing. I could recite, in order, all of the heavyweight champions of the world from James J. Corbett onwards. Controversies in boxing, such as the famous long count in the bout between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, enthralled me. I was fascinated when I read that Sydney had hosted a fight for the heavyweight title in 1909 between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson. In my late teens I went to Sydney Stadium, in Rushcutters Bay, to see several bouts. Years later, when I was in politics, some of my friends were horrified when I confessed to my boyhood interest in boxing. As I grew older I lost interest in it, in part because I realised the terrible damage people suffered, but I had been quite taken by it in my youth.
From a young age I was an avid reader of the Biggles books, authored by Captain W.E. Johns, which told the story of a group of British airmen who not only fought heroically in the Battle of Britain but did other great things in defence of liberty. A little later I devoured books such as Reach for the Sky, by Paul Brickhill, an Australian, which covered the amazing war service of Douglas Bader, who lost both legs but resumed flying in the Royal Air Force (RAF); The Dambusters,